EVENTS

Things To Never Say While Giving A Presentation

If you find yourself saying “oh, I better speed up to finish”, you have already completely fucked uppe miserably. Failure to plan ahead so you can finish on time without “speeding up” is a gross insult to your audience that cannot be remedied on the fly.

Perhaps something like that could be attributed to too many comments within the time frame. I know I usually give presentations with the explicit statement that if you have a question or comment regarding something I’ve said, please do say it.

On the other hand, my presentations are keyed to fit the allotted time with some to spare. I usually include four or five extra slides at the very end in case it’s thirty minutes into a forty-five minute presentation and I’m at the last slide in the deck.

Having more to say than you can fit in the allotted time is not an insult.

Planning the entire time for questions as part of your talk, so you talk (without speeding up or skipping slides) all the way till the moderator says “thank you, unfortunately we have no time for questions, and the next speaker is” – planning a 15-minute talk to take 20 minutes or a 12-minute talk to take 15 – that is an insult to your audience.

I know that some people do this deliberately, because they’re afraid of having to answer questions. Uh, excuse me, if you can’t answer questions about the topic of your presentation, you either haven’t understood the topic well enough to present it, or you have anxiety and should have presented a poster instead.

I would think that anything you write, anything at all, would be something never to say when giving a presentation.

The Four Fs of Biology, heddle: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing.

Jesus, slc1, it’s not like heddle is hiding his identity – there’s no need to lay his whole credentials list out there as if you’re Anonymous doxxing a child molester. I’m pretty sure CPP can handle his own self against teasing.

I’m not sure that realizing but not acknowledging you’ve hopelessly fucked up your timing helps anything, and I’ve certainly found that talks I’ve prepared have taken more or less time in the delivery than they did in rehearsal – nerves have a way of screwing with subjective time perception even if you clock-watch.